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Thursday, October 4, 2012

It's time for the Unschooling Blog Carnival to roll back into town! Our theme this time is

The Best Thing!

That's up to interpretation, don't you think?! Ha!

Only a handful of unschooling bloggers submitted their posts this time. Who knew this would be so tough?! So thanks to Frank and Teresa for hunting around for The Best unschooling blogposts out on the web to add to this carnival. We've listed them below as Unschooling Blog Favs. We know you'll enjoy these posts from unschooling bloggers around the world.

Be sure to read the bottom of the Carnival - we're planning a little Carnival Tweaking in the future. And as usual, please leave comments for the bloggers when you stop by their blogs. It warms their hearts to know you read about their lives or their thoughts on unschooling. And let them know you found them through the Unschooling Blog Carnival, okay?

As usual, spread the word!

The October Unschooling Blog Carnival is back and ready to share all The Best Things!

Enjoy!

~Sue

The Best Thing!

Frank shares The Best Thing in his blog singularity. As usual, Frank stretches our brains a bit with his roundabout journey to identify THE best thing.

Isn't that what unschooling is all about, learning how to love your own life and live it so fully that maybe it even spills over to other lives? Yes, you're right. It's what everybody's life should be about, not just unschoolers' lives.

Every day can be the best day of the week. You can wake up on your own time and do what you like best for the whole day. The day is yours. What you eat, read, play with, wear, listen to or watch and when; who you talk to or how long you stay quiet; where you go or don't go -- most of these things (with some real life realities in there) can happen the way you like best.

While this might be the "short list" of all the Pattersons' Best Things, they all came about because of the parenting choices we made and our decision to be unschoolers. For us, it's all about Relationships. And these relationships can bring so much joy BECAUSE of the time we spent nurturing and trusting.

"Because as soon as one thing ended, another began and there wasn't really any time for picking up. And that is where perspective went from resentment about a messy house to gratitude that I could provide the space for such adventure."

"Our philosophy is one of cooperation and sharing, with a healthy dose of ignoring society's arbitrary, different-from-country-to-country rules about the ages by which kids **should** be doing certain things like driving cars, paying their own way, moving out, and so on. Society doesn't get to decide those things, we do."

Which Way Do I Go? from Linda's blog Unschooling Me gives an explanation of why it's so hard to really internalize the idea of unschooling your children through a simple question & answer format.

"If I share an experience with you, it is so that you can see ONE of the possibilities of how things can work out when we give attention to finding a real, equitable, comfortable and fair solution to something that was a problem for us. It is intended to give you some different ways to look and think about your situation, and to encourage you that it is possible to find that working solution, but it is NOT intended to suggest that your solution would be identical, because the people in your family are not identical to the people in mine, nor is your situation identical to ours. "

"A one day snapshot of radical unschooling, in response to the oft asked questions, "What does it look like?' 'What about math?' 'What about science?' 'What about history?' and so forth."

Unschooling Blog Carnival Morphs!

We are always thinking about how we want this carnival to flow. It seems many of our unschooling bloggers have some trouble with our more abstract topics and themes... so let's change this up! Part of the wonderfulness of unschooling can be attributed to the ability to Be Flexible. So the Unschooling Blog Carnival is no exception.

And we need YOUR help! We're going to look for Unschooling Favorites. There are certainly more unschooling blog READERS than BLOGGERS, so we need your help looking for unschooling blog posts that you love reading. We want the Unschooling Blog Carnival to be somewhere unschoolers can go to find a little encouragement.

So here's the plan:

No more themes (too restricting)

Submit blog posts that YOU find most inspiring!

These Unschooling Favorites should be fairly recent - but if you stumble across something wonderful, and the blogger wrote it within the last 6 months, that will work too!

Unschooling Bloggers can still submit their own blogposts - just pick a post that you think is your best writing/most thought-provoking or encouraging.

Do you want to be part of the "Searching for Unschooling Favorites" Team? If you're already reading blogs, why not participate! This might even end up being a cool way to become more involved WITHOUT writing your own blog!